(Translator/editor’s note: While the Theatre de la Ville furnished the Dance Insider & Arts Voyager with a copy of Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota’s statement in the original French, what follows is a journalistic, and not official, translation, as the English text was not coordinated with the Theatre de la Ville. Demarcy-Mota’s stance here is striking in both a global and historic context. In the first realm, whereas “Dance NYC,” which should get the Bessie award for “Least Effective and Most Out of Touch Arts Lobbying Organization in the United States,” is now making the ludicrous claim that “dancers are necessary workers,” putting them on the same level, essential worker-wise, as health and food workers (exactly the kind of insulated naval-gazing thinking that makes dance be treated less serioiusly in the U.S. than in Europe), EDM has a more global, less self-interested, au-dela de sa propre nombril perspective. And in the historic context, and given that French president Emmanuel Macron has likened the battle against the pandemic to “a war,” it’s no accident that Sarah Bernhardt, in whose former stomping-ground the Theater de la Ville EDM directs is based, turned her own lavish home into a MASH unit during the Prussian siege of Paris of 1870 — herself volunteering as a nurse.)

Five propositions imagined with an ensemble of players from the domains of Health, Culture, Education, and Justice.

Four temporalities whose rhythm has been determined by the epidemic: the confinement, the deconfinement, the coming season and the Day After. Four pillars to put in place: Culture, Health, Education, Justice.

Health has been our absolute priority these past few months. Culture is our absolute priority at this moment that we emerge from confinement.

Our country, certainly attenuated but profoundly modified, has a strong desire to reconstruct itself with a view to creating a different kind of world where the idea of solidarity is at the heart of the debate.

In order for our society to recover its strength, we would like to propose a new model able to bring together the arts, science, and education with, as its corner-stone, the union between health and culture.

We wanted to bring together an ensemble of allies from the fields of health, justice, education, and the arts to create a new space for dialogue and coordinate new actions.

Together we are founding “Tenir Parole” (Keeping our Word), a new alliance of leaders from different realms who share a common desire to stimulate and propel a new approach to imagination.

We will strive for the emergence of new forms of solidarity in relying on our capacity to think together. We will work against frontiers, whether they be of the physical or mental variety or between disciplines or human beings.

We will create a proximity and an amity to traverse this unprecedented period of history together.

“Tenir parole” (Keeping our Word) is a way to infuse power in the imagination, to incarnate a convergence of visions, to stimulate the manifestation of life and give hope.

Rather than allow an uncertain present to be imposed upon us, we want to invent desirable tomorrows. Thus, at the end of this tempest, if we’ve “kept our word,” we will have learned, reflected, exchanged, and created.

One Calendar, Five propositions

The Troupe of the Imaginary

Created during the confinement and engaged amidst poetic and scientific consultations, the troupe brings together at this stage more than 50 people from various horizons: the actors of the Theatre de la Ville troupe, joined by young Italian, Senegalese, Egyptian, Cameroonian, Central-African, Congolese, Taiwanese, and French actors, as well as by scientists associated with the project: the neurosurgeons Carine Karachi and Hayat Belait; the neurology professor David Grabli; biologist Marie-Christine Maurel; biologist and philosopher Georges Chapouthier; physician Kamil Fadel; architect Denis Laming; and astrophysicist Jean Audouze.

Together, we have developed, in order to be able to act from the moment confinement began (March 15 in France), invent alternative ways of creating, maintain a link with the population and combat individual isolation, “poetic and scientific consultations by telephone,” which have already reached nearly 5,000 people across France and beyond.

The consultations have been offered in 15 languages: Seven European languages (French, Greek, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and German), six languages spoken on the African continent (Wolof, Beti, Lingala, Sango, Congo, and Pidgin) and also in Arab and Mandarin. “The troupe of the Imaginary” will develop new actions and continue its consultations in the months to come.

Dancers, musicians, and historians, partnering with the Rectorate of Paris, are joining this team beginning May 18 to suggest new forms of consultations.

The European Encounters of May-June

Meetings will be held starting the week of May 18. In rapport with the evolution of the deconfinement, they can be held by distance and bring together the world of culture — public and private — as well as those of health, justice, and education.

The emergence from confinement as a moment to learn together is the occasion to create bridges, to propose a new model which brings people together to co-construct perspectives on a common future. Because ignorance is also a form of confinement and it is through knowledge that we must find the emergency exit that will enable us to escape from asphyxia.

At the hour when we must all construct the 2020s, let us make our theaters the place for a community gathering, the reflection of our social commitments and of our will for esperance. Let us build a new Europe, a Europe of culture but also of sciences, of the environment and of young people.

Open-air artistic propositions beginning in June

The cultural world must now support the care-givers, the care-receivers, the confined. This is the moment to experiment, test, invent.

We will be allying ourselves with the doctors of the Salpêtrière Hospital and with the Rectorate of the City of Paris to initiate the first experiments, artistic manifestations to be held outdoors and in different spaces around Paris. Performances, readings, concerts, testimonials by the caregivers, actions for the sick, film screenings and art installations will be proposed in unexpected places: from the gardens of the Champs-Élysées to those of the Salpêtrière, not forgetting the parks, retirement homes, elementary schools, and high-school courtyards.

These propositions must be geared towards the population in its entirety and inscribe themselves in the continuity of our art education programs and of our commitment to re-inventing a place for the arts in schools.

“The troupe of the Imaginary,” with the ensemble of 50 actors, scientists, dancers, and musicians who constitute it will be fully mobilized from the end of May and throughout the Summer.

The Academy of Health and Culture

In connection with the program “Charter 18XX1 – Turning 18 in the 21st Century,” a new academy centering on health and culture will be launched to work with young people and recreate ties with the experienced of the older members of our society. Encounters around art and science will take place during the month of August, and can be open to the public.

For the first time in its history, the Theatre de la Ville’s spaces will be open all Summer:

* At l’Espace Cardin, in partnership with the doctors of Salpêtrière Hospital, young artists and young care-givers will work to elaborate projects which can be prolonged this fall on themes linked notably to movement: “Normality and abnormality,” “Liberty of movement, Liberty of thought.”

* At the Theatre des Abbesses [in Montmartre] ateliers on the practice of dance and theater will be offered, free and open to the public of all ages. This new project is inscribed in a partnership with the city of Paris and can include European partners, to trace new perspectives together and share our desire for a theater without borders.

* A 2020/21 season of solidarity and re-invention: Today, we need to deconstruct our seasons to be able to reconstruct them in another fashion, in imagining many potential scenarios. Together, we are ready to adapt, to re-invent, to re-assess our different propositions to amplify the occasions for solidarity with the artists, the health milieu, the worlds of education and justice and also our European and African friends and partners.

Three scenarios:

* Scenario #1 incorporates the obligation for physical social distancing as health regulations evolve, leading us to drastically reduce our capacity to accommodate the public in our theaters.

* Scenario #2 adds to this the absence of all international theater, dance, and music companies outside Europe, the frontiers outside the European member states remaining closed.

* Scenario #3 includes the absence of European as well as extra-European companies, who combined represent more than 50% of the planned programming at the Theatre de la Ville and the city-wide Festival D’Automne between this September and December. Under this scenario, we will only be able to welcome companies situated on the national territory.

Whichever scenario comes to pass, nothing will be, nothing can be, like before. So why not transform these obstacles into a new challenge? After months of strict confinement, we now need to push back the walls, quench our thirst for creation, for bodies and movements, for encounters with the population. We will mobilize artists and those from other disciplines to invent innovative propositions which rely on our capacity to imagine together. Next season we will go into the hospitals, the elementary and middle schools, the high schools, the parks and the gardens, the stadiums if need be.

In the theaters, we will invent unprecedented subterfuges, adapted parcourses and real artistic propositions in dance, in music, and in theater which turn sanitary restrictions into the stipulations for a new imaginary, and we will find the pathways to economic viability. If the virus has felled a number of our fellow citizens, we will take back the edge on the terrains of the imagination and of thought, of sharing and of solidarity.

The Day After

If we have collectively been able to invent new spaces and new forms, to experiment with new ways of being and making, to create dialogues between the ensemble of the arts, the sciences, and different domains of thought and of the economy, we would now attempt to erect new foundations for the future.

It is the moment to consider that this epidemic is also a factor in the acceleration of our choices and of our commitments. Today, we must imagine a Day After which will be comprised of a new reflection on a planet that will be durable and solidary. Today, we need to keep our word.

Emmanuel Demarcy-MotaMay 13, 2020Paris

We would like to extend our thanks to all those who have committed themselves with us and to those who will do so in the future.

Editor’s note: On this May Day 2020, with Donald Trump abusing the Military Production Act to potentially send workers to their deaths by asserting he has the right to pre-empt state decisions to close the meat-packing plants which are loci for virus contamination (where’s Upton Sinclair when you need him?), and with the governors of Iowa and Nebraska insisting that those who refuse to return to hazardous working conditions will see their unemployment benefits cut off, we thought the moment propitious to revise and share our translated excerpts of Michel Ragon’s “La mémoire des vainçus” (literally, “the memory of the vanquished”), as proof that if the struggle is still not over, the battles of the vanquished are never really in vain. And can still serve as inspiration for the labor and human rights struggles to come. (To read the Paris Tribune / Arts Voyager serialized publication of Michel Ragon’s “Trompe-l’Oeil,” click here. )

“The ideal is when one is able to die for one’s ideas. Politics is when one can live for them.”

— Charles Péguy, cited on frontispiece, “The Book of the Vanquished.”

“Books can also die, but they last longer than men. They get passed on from hand to hand, like the Olympic flame. My friend, my father, my older brother, you have not entirely slid into oblivion, because this book of your life exists.”

— Michel Ragon, Prologue, “The Book of the Vanquished.”

Part One: “The little girl in the fishmongers’ wagon” (1899-1917)

(Excerpt, 1911-1912.)

“As for me, I’m just a poor sap! For those of us at the bottom of the heap, there’s nothing but bad breaks in this world and the one beyond. And of course, when we get to Heaven, it’ll be up to us to make sure the thunder-claps work.”

— Georg Büchner, “Woyzeck,” cited on the frontispiece of Part One of “The Book of the Vanquished.”

Translator’s note: With the exception of Fred and Flora, who may be real, may be fictional, or may be composites, all the personages cited below and in Michel Ragon’s novel are based on real historical figures, notably Paul Delesalle (1870-1948), the Left Bank bookseller. Later adopting the pen name Victor Serge, Victor Kibaltchich (1890-1947) would become a noted Socialist theorist who, like Fred in “The Book of the Vanquished,” eventually broke with the Bolsheviks. Rirette Maîtrejean was his actual companion. Raymond-la-Science, René Valet, and Octave Garnier were real members of the Bonnot Gang, the details of their denouement recounted by Ragon as translated below accurate. For the other personalities evoked, including leading figures in the European Anarcho-Syndicaliste milieu in its heyday, as well as certain events alluded to, I’ve included brief footnotes, as these personalities and events may not be as familiar to an Anglophone audience as to Ragon’s French readers, for whom they represent markers in the national memory, notably the infamous “Bande à Bonnot,” whose exploits still resonate in a contemporary France wracked by youthful alienation and haunted by the terrorism in which this is sometimes manifest.

Every morning the cold awoke the boy at dawn. Long before the street-lanterns dimmed, in the pale gray light he shook off the dust and grime of his hovel at the end of a narrow alley flanking the Saint-Eustache church. Stretching out his limbs like a cat he flicked off the fleas and, like a famished feline, took off in search of nourishment, flairing the aromas wafting down the street. With Les Halles wholesale market coming to life at the same time, it didn’t take long for him to score something hot. The poultry merchants never opened their stalls before debating over a bowl of bouillon, and the boy always received his share. Then he’d skip off, hop-scotching between the trailers loaded with heaps of victuals. Every Friday he’d march up the rue des Petits-Carreaux to meet the fishmongers’ wagons arriving from Dieppe, drawn by the aroma of seaweed and fish-scales surging towards the center of Paris. The sea — this sea which he’d never seen and which he pictured as a catastrophic inundation — cut a swathe through the countryside before it descended from the heights of Montmartre. He could hear the carts approaching from far away, like the rumbling of thunder. The churning of the metallic wagon wheels stirred up a racket fit to raise the dead, amplified by the clippety-clop of the horseshoes. Numbed by the long voyage, enveloped in their thick overcoats, the fishmongers dozed in their wagons, mechanically hanging onto the reigns. The horses knew the way by heart. When the first carriages hit the iron pavilions of the market, the resultant traffic jam and grating of the brakes rose up in a grinding, piercing crescendo that reverberated all the way back up to the Poissonnière quartier. The drivers abruptly started awake, spat out a string of invectives, and righted themselves in their seats. Those farther back had to wait until the first arrivals unloaded their merchandise. The horses pawed the ground and stamped their feet. The majority of the men jumped off their carts to go have a little nip in the bistros just raising their shutters.

On this particular Friday, at the rear of one of the wagons sat a small girl. Her naked legs and bare feet dangled off the edge of the cart, and the boy noticed nothing more than this white skin. He drew near. The girl, her head leaning forward, her face hidden by the tussled blonde hair which fell over her eyes, didn’t see him at first. As for the boy, he only had eyes for those plump swinging gams. By the time he was almost on top of them, he could hear the girl singing out a rhymed ditty. He approached his hand, touching one of her calves.

“Eh, lower the mitts! Why, the nerve!”

For the rest of the lengthy excerpt, subscribers e-mail paulbenitzak@gmail.com . Not yet a Dance Insider / Arts Voyager subscriber? Subscriptions are $59 or Euros / year, or $36/students, teachers, artists, dancers, and the unemployed. Just designate your payment via PayPal to paulbenitzak@gmail.com , or write us at that address to learn how to pay by check. Exceptionally for this excerpt, even non-subscribers can can write us before May 7 and receive a free copy.

Part 10 in the Paris Tribune / Arts Voyager exclusive English-language translation of Michel Ragon’s seminal 1956 novel taking on the world of Abstract art, artists, art collectors, art dealers, and art critics in Paris, as well as post-War anti-Semitism in France. For the first nine parts, click here. For more on Michel Ragon, in French, click here. To learn how to support our work, e-mail artsvoyager@gmail.com . To support us through PayPal, just designate your donation to paulbenitzak@gmail.com .

Fifteen days later, in the throes of correcting the proofs of the second issue, Fontenoy felt a sudden surge of discouragement. Blanche was working in her atelier at the Cité Falguière. He dropped everything and went to see his companion.

Walking down the Boulevard Montparnasse, he took stock of the results of the first issue of the revue. It was too soon to draw any conclusions, but he had the impression of hurtling against a wall. Like Manhès, what had pleased him about this adventure was the battle to come, the possibility of finally saying in print everything he’d been stifling about this conspiracy against the movement of painting that he loved. This revue would be a little bomb which would go off in the midst of the conformists, the cabals. They’d be forced to respond to so many specific accusations. But neither L’Artiste, nor Le Figaro, nor any other newspaper had yet noted, even with two measly lines, the new revue’s existence. Everything continued just as it had been, as if the revue didn’t exist at all. Some booksellers in Montparnasse and Saint-Germain-des-Prés had put it in their windows. Its successful launch depended on them, and on eventual subscriptions in response to the comp. copies that had been sent out.

Blanche was flattened out on her stomach on the divan, working on a water-color. Fontenoy plopped down next to her. In the atelier, numerous water-colors had been framed behind glass, ready for the imminent exhibition.

“You know,” she remarked, continuing to paint, “it’s no laughing-matter to try to get the bookshops to sell the revue….”

“I know. But it’s the only way to spread the word.”

“That’s easy for you to say. You made the rounds of the art bookshops that you know well, and that know you. No problem. You leave the copies on consignment and they say thanks. But me, I hit the other bookshops. You have no idea how they react. Some don’t accept consignments as a matter of sheer principle. They tell me: ‘When you come back to pick up the unsold copies, they’ve disappeared under a pile. They can’t be found and we have to pay you anyway. Two months later they surface and are unsellable. No no, no consignments.’ ‘Okay, so buy a fixed number of issues.’ ‘You must be joking. We’re inundated as it is!’ And those are the nice ones. Others take a quick look, disabusedly shrug their shoulders, and say no. Some pick up the revue, leaf through it, and burst out in guffaws: ‘Ah! Cool, it’s a take-off? I get it — very clever…. But our customers won’t get it at all.’ I was, however, able to place a few copies that were accepted on consignment, begrudgingly, and in those cases most likely because of my gorgeous eyes.”

In a corner of the atelier Fontenoy spotted the pile of rejected revues. He had a sudden spurt of revolt, of anger:

“But how the hell are we supposed to get off the ground if the newspapers give us the silent treatment, if the bookstores refuse consignments, if the subscription drives meet up with nothing but negligence and indifference!?”

Fontenoy perceived that hostility to their cause wasn’t the only factor. The bookstores held themselves above the internecine factional squabbles, but their detached attitude could become just as lethal, if not moreso, as any frontal attacks.

Blanche straightened up her material on the table, cast a last glance at the fresh water-color she’d just finished and came over to sit next to Fontenoy, lacing her plump arms around him.

“Worries, worries, worries! How’s about putting your ‘big ideas’ aside for a moment and getting back to the two of us? Have you finished the preface for my exhibition? What are you planning, for me, in the revue?”

“All that on the other hand is going very well,” Fontenoy responded with lassitude. “Look, I have the text for your preface right here in my pocket. Read through it. For the revue, Rinsbroek will talk about you, it’s preferable.”

“And you won’t put in any of my images?”

“That’ll be up to Rinsbroek.”

“Come again? But what good does it do then to be the editor-in-chief?”

“Rinsbroek wants to talk about you. He’ll say what he judges needs to be said and we’ll publish a reproduction of your work if he considers that you merit it.”

Blanche bit her lip. Fontenoy grasped her tenderly around the waist and kissed her on the temple:

“Listen, Blanche. Don’t get upset. I’m being brutal, but we have much bigger worries these days. Your exhibition will go quite well and in all probability we’ll publish a photo in the revue. Rinsbroek’s article will certainly sing your praises, otherwise he wouldn’t have accepted the assignment. But on principle, I just want to make it clear, once again, that I won’t put any pressure on him. It’s just not comprehensible. It’s as if you’re asking me to employ the very methods in our revue that we’re fighting against when others practice them.”

Blanche didn’t answer. She read over Fontenoy’s handwritten text for the preface:

“How set are you on citing Klee? I know you just mean to use it as a reference, but won’t that just make them think that I imitate him, like all the rest?”

Fontenoy replied, exasperated: “Delete Klee if he bothers you so much!”

Blanche got riled up:

“I like Klee. I don’t deny that. But the reference here just bothers me.”

And she put her dainty little finger on the sheet of paper. “It’s like your phrase: ‘Blanche Favard is an abstract painter who composes with parcels of memory.’ I understand what you’re getting at. My compositions include forms which resemble foliage, even landscapes. I agree. But what will Charles Roy say? The Salon des Réalitiés Nouvelles jury is quite capable of rejecting my submissions under the pretext that they’re Naturalist.”

“So now it’s Charles Roy’s opinion that matters the most to you!?” Fontenoy exclaimed, stupefied.

One of the benefits of the Orsay Museum’s latest penchant for re-envisioning the late 19th-century work which is its charge through the eyes of contemporaneous critics is that the polyglot writers often dictate a polyglot selection of artists which means that major figures overdue for their own solo shows get a cameo. Such is the case with the exceptional Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898)’s 1879 oil “Jeunes filles au bord de la mer (Young women at the sea-side),” which features in the work exhibited at the Orsay and theoretically to be exhibited through July 19 at the Strasbourg Museum of Contemporary Art for Huysmans from Degas to Grünewald: As seen by Francesco Vezzoli. Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) may well have referred to himself as a “Dutchman putrefied with Parisianism,” but if we’re to judge by the Puvis painting above, his tastes were anything but. It’s no surprise that in 1880 — a year after this tableau was made — Emile Zola invited Huysmans to collaborate in the collection “Les Soirées de Medan.” Which connection is enough of a pretense for us to turn the Puvis floor over to the great man, as Zola singled out the painter in his review of the 1875 Salon, published in two “Letters from Paris” which appeared in Le Sémaphore de Marseille of May 3 and 4 and in “Le Messager de l’Europe” in Saint-Petersburg. Today’s translation and art goes out to Holly, and to all the Holly Golightlys of the world, in esperance for the period when we’ll all be able to go lightly again. — PB-I

I’ve saved Puvis de Chavannes’s large tableau for the end. Secluded at the Sainte-Croix convent, Radegonde gives refuge to poets and protects the world of Letters against the epoch’s barbary. Here at last is a truly original talent, who trained himself far from any Academic influences. He alone can succeed in the art of decorative painting, in the vast frescos exposed to the raw light of public institutions. In our times, with the crumbling of classic principles, the fate of mural paintings has become critical. The nobility of heroes, the simplicity of the drawing, every rule which makes the tableau a type of bas-relief in which the ‘cooler’ colors have trouble standing out in the midst of the marble of churches and palaces, have collapsed, making way for the explosion of the romantic brush. And suddenly, it seems to me, Puvis de Chavannes arrives and finds a breach in this impasse. He knows how to be interesting and alive, in simplifying the lines and painting with uniform tones. Radegonde, surrounded by nuns in white gowns, is listening to a poet declaiming verse between the walls of a convent. The scene exudes a grandiose and peaceful charm. To tell the truth, for me Puvis de Chavannes is but a precursor. It is indispensible that large-scale painting is able to find subjects in contemporary life. I don’t know who will be the painter with the genius to know how to extract the art of our civilization, and I don’t know how he’ll do it. But it is indisputable that art does not depend on either draperies or the antique nude; it takes root in humanity itself and consequently every society must have its own conception of beauty.